Australian Standards for Commercial Bike Racks

I can safely assume that since you are reading this website you are either interested in installing some bike racks – either at your place of residence, your workspace or you need to provide commercial bike racks for the public at large. Probably the first thing you need to do is consider if there is an Australian Standard covering bike stands and if any standard applies to your situation

Given the amount of regulation that exists these days you will not be surprised to find that indeed there is an Australian Standard – AS 2890 was put into effect in 1993 and I do not think it has yet been altered. AS 2890 sets out the requirements for installers of commercial bike racks – in other words if you are planning to install commercial bike racks for the general public to use in an open space then AS 2890 applies to you. AS 2890 does NOT apply if you are only looking for a bike rack for your garage at home. Private individuals can store their own bikes with whatever suits their requirements. Likewise if you operate a bike store, a bike hire business or you provide bikes at your tourist facility then you are quite free to use any bicycle stand you wish. This is because you do not expect the stand itself to deter theft and you want free and easy access to the bicycles.

The main purpose of the AS2890 is to enforce a minimum level of security for the bicycle owner and protection of the general public from hazardous obstructions. I’ll address each in turn. As you can imagine a bicycle rider does not want their bicycle stolen anymore than you want to have your computer nicked. The main way in which AS2890 addresses this is to require that bicycle parking rails are supplied which are roughly the same size as the bicycle frame. This allows the rider to secure the bicycle at multiple points to the rail rather than just locking the front wheel to a stand. And this is fair enough too – imagine you are leaving your bike outside a train station all day, it would be really nice to know it’s going to be there when you get back. Depending on how old you are you may recall that outside some public pools they used to just cut a hole in the concrete for you to slot your front wheel into. Well needless to say that hole can be quite a trip hazard and ‘commercial bike racks’ such as this have long since been frowned upon. But even the stands that we make really should not be placed in a high pedestrian traffic area – after all they are only 35cm high and if you purchased them in powder coated black then they will be nearly invisible at night.

Therefore our bike stands are designed to keep bikes neat and tidy – they are not designed to be placed where pedestrians can trip over them and they are not designed to protect a bike against theft. In all other cases they are an ideal way of getting an existing scrum of bikes lined up neat and tidy.

If you need a copy of AS2890 then you can purchase a copy from SAI Global.

If you have any questions, please fell free to call our Product Manager on 0430 016044.